The Painter of Shanghai by Jennifer Cody Epstein

murmurs.
    His eyes are shut: he can’t see how lost she is for a response.
    He kicks his trousers and drawers free. She’s supposed to be helping: Jinling said so. But she suddenly feels unable to move her arms. He rubs himself, eyes half shut, lips flaccid and half open. He looks dead. But his breath is quick and moist and hot. Sweat falls in streams from his hair. His legs push, opening hers and encountering no resistance. He hits her lightly anyway: ‘Don’t fight.’ Jinling has told her he likes to be the aggressor.
    He groans, reaches down, finds her in the place where she is as dry and as rough as wood. Jinling gave her an oil of some sort. Put this on first. But it’s too late now. Heis arching, pushing. She grits her teeth, anticipating the pain. Of course, she knew there’d be pain. Nothing good comes without pain, her mama often said. But surely she didn’t mean this. Did she?
    ‘Oh, yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’
    Something sticky and slippery; the pain giving way to something deeper; a slow ache as though she is swelling inside. Yuliang grips the bed’s edge. Yi Gan’s eyes are like moon slivers, pure white as the pupils roll back. His dock-weathered face knots up with pleasure. Yuliang blinks, and suddenly he looks old, enormous, frenzied. Like Chung Qai, the black-faced keeper of Hell’s gates…
    It hurts !
    But Yuliang won’t cry. No scenes, they said. And besides, she has cried enough: when she woke this morning, her eyes were so swollen that Jinling had to layer cold tea dregs on them to soothe them.
    He shifts slickly against her skin, and she suddenly panics: her torso is sticky with blood. But no, she’s just wet; his sweat smears her face and breasts. That’s why it’s called wetting the sheets … A slow rip.
    Oh. Oh. No.
    You don’t have to let them into your head, Jinling said. Think of something else. Mama’s eyes. Godmother’s garden. The moon on a still night. The feeling she got when she finally stitched a perfect flower… He pushes, two, three, four times. ‘Ahhh. You are sweet, girl. So sweet…’ His throat is a black tunnel, a dangling glob of glistening pink. She shuts her eyes. She is a melon, and he’s splitting her open. She will break.
    She will break…
    ‘Aiiiiiiiighhhhh,’ he says. ‘Aiiighhhhhhhhhhhhh.’ He gives two more calls, shudders as though shot. His eyes are wide; his lips are a rictus of ecstasy. Then he crumples over her, stops moving entirely. Is he dead? For this happens. It happens with old men, and very fat ones. Lirong says it happened to her once. But Suyin says she’s lying…
    His foot twitches against her calf. It feels oddly plush, oddly pointed. It takes a moment for her to understand: he never even took off his shoes.

9
    Few girls who enter this world survive it. Many end up like Xiaochen: skeletal, scarred by abuse, addiction, and sex-sickness. Some, like the girl from Wuhu Lake, are either killed or kill themselves. Others ‘demote’ from flower to some other tangential position: musician, teacher, a top girl’s maid. A select few, however, triumph over Fate’s glum intentions, and Jinling plans to be among these.
    Between Merchant Yi’s assistance and her cache of jewelry, the top girl claims to be mere months from buying out her Hall contract. Yuliang tries, under her tutelage, to follow suit. The passing months and men are marked by a slow accumulation of glitter: a gold pendant in the shape of a boar. A butterfly hairpin of Cantonese filigree, with antennae that tremble at the slightest of movements. A Japanese doll in a gold-threaded kimono, her skin wax-white, like chrysanthemum petals. The most valuable gift Yuliang receives is a golden dragon, fashioned into a heavy bangle. Her patron pulls it from its tissue-paper lair on the eve of Yuliang’s seventeenth birthday – the two-year anniversary of her hair-combing.
    ‘I’m not worthy,’ Yuliang says, twisting the beast on her wrist. It stares balefully at its backside,